9. Use Optimized Images

An optimized image will have 4 things:

1. small file size
2. clean file name
3. good dimensions
4. proper format/extension (jpg, png, gif)
5. text in its ALT tag

(the first 4 are for site speed)

I'll try to keep this one short...

First, of course, you'll need an image.

You can 1) download free images from image sites, or 2) make one at Canva.

After you find or create an image,make sure that the image file name isn't something ugly like:

free_2015_05_22-money_image-123

If it is, change it to something like:

free-money-image1

As for the png, jpg, etc, I'd recommend going for jpg for images with a lot of color. Like real-life photos.

For screenshots png is fine.

OK, the next thing you'll want to do is shrink its file size. Most of the time you'll get an image with a file size way over 100KB.

You'll wanna cut that down to around 10KB to 40KB because if you don't, your page loading time will take forever (100KB x 10 images = a lot).

So go over to TinyPNG.com, upload your image, and download after it does its work.

Now you've got a nice image.

But there's still one more thing:

The ALT tag.

So upload your new image to your post, but don't insert it just yet.

You're going to wanna put some text into the ALT tag first.

You can put your keyword here, if it makes sense.

But if your image is, say, a pig holding money...

...then, you would put pig holding money into the ALT tag.

Task:

• Optimize all your images before uploading and publishing

10. Site Speed

Site speed is a big ranking (and user experience) factor today.

Here are my speed test results:

Pingdom:

GTMetrix:

Not bad. But not the best either.

If your site is slow, 2 things can happen:

1. you can lose search rankings
2. you can lose visitors

Take a look at this:

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

Source: KISSmetrics

Pretty scary stuff, huh?

So what are the reasons to why a site is so slow?

It can be a number of reasons:

• too many plugins
• some of your activated plugins take a lot of loading time
• your images are heavy (huge file sizes)
• your images' dimensions are off
• you have cache problems
• your database needs optimizing - too much post/page revisions, trashed comments, posts, and pages, pingbacks and trackbacks, unused tags, etc.

There are a few other reasons (HTML, JS, and CSS issues). But they're way more complicated and if you don't know what you're doing, you could break your site.

So how can you improve your loading time?

1 word:

plugins.

There's a plugin for everything, pretty much.

Here's how you can speed up your site by installing a few plugins:

For caching problems (pretty much every site has them), there are several plugins to choose from. Here are a few:

• Comet Cache - this is the one that I use.
• WP Super Cache - 1,000,000+ Active Installs
• W3 Total Cache - 900,000+ Active Installs
• WP Fastest Cache - 70,000+ Active Installs

Using any one of these plugins will help decrease your loading time.

For images:

Heavy images are almost a 100% reason why your loading time is high.

Here are a few plugins:

• Optimize Images Resizing
• Resize Image After Upload
• EWWW Image Optimizer - API Key required
• Kraken Image Optimizer - API Key required

Note: I don't use anything like this anymore. I found that by compressing my images before uploading them into WordPress using TinyPNG, it saves me a lot. However, you may use one of these plugins for all the other images you've uploaded in the past.

Here's how to find out which or if any plugins are slowing down your site:

• P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Here are plugins that'll optimize your database:

• Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions (highly recommended)
• WP-Optimize

They do the same thing. They delete:

• post/page autosaves/revisions
• trashed posts, pages, and comments
• unused tags
• spammed items
• expired transients
• trackbacks and pingbacks

It has saved me 10.6 MB in 2 weeks. WOW!

Here are plugins that optimize the more complicated stuff (CSS, JS, Leverage Browser Cache, etc)

• Autoptimize - easy to use - install, activate, read and check a couple boxes, click a button
• WP Performance Score Booster - easier to use - install, activate, click a button.

(I used to use WP Performance Score Booster. I changed it to Autoptimize later. Now I don't use any of them. It interfered with one of my other plugins.)

Here's my list of plugins I use for site speed purposes:

• Comet Cache
• Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
• Resize Image After Upload (deleted)
• WP Performance Score Booster (deleted)
• P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Task:

• Install & Activate a few of these plugins to speed up your site

11. Clean & Responsive Design

Have you ever gone to a blog that looks so horrible?

Yeah, I bet you pressed the back button before you even blinked twice, huh?

Yeah, well that is exactly what's gonna happen if you don't have a nice, clean theme.

And if you want mobile traffic (which is now more than desktop traffic according to Google), you will need a responsive theme. Or at least a mobile version of your site.

Here are 4 examples of responsive theme descriptions:

This is what to look for when you're search the free WP theme database.

And here's what a responsive theme will look like:

Task:

• Have a clean theme. Don't use too many ads.
• If you want mobile traffic, make sure your theme will adjust to any screen.

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